Our Mr. Brooks Goes on Expedition to the Santorium

DES MOINES — David Brooks, intrepid explorer, has hied himself hence again, tramping bravely off on one of his mystical quests — real or imagined — deep into the mist-shrouded wilderness that is The Real America, this time washing up in Radar O'Reilly's hometown to collect himself a dateline, as well as some wild tales to tell once he gets back to the gentleman's lounge at the Old Foofs Club, where he can sit in front of the fire, call for another brandy, and scratch the ears of his Irish setter, which he has named Moral Hazard, and which will eye its master's radius bone with hungry eyes, because it hates its name and the man who gave it to him.

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It seems from today's effort in the Times that Rick Santorum, Papist nutter, has plucked at the political heartstrings of Our Mr. Brooks with his tales of a coal-miner grandfather and working-class daddy, along with his dedication to faith and family, even when that dedication seems rather devised from old Stephen King novels than from holy scripture....

Santorum does not have a secular worldview. This is not just a matter of going to church and home-schooling his children. When his baby Gabriel died at childbirth, he and his wife, a neonatal nurse, spent the night in a hospital bed with the body and then took it home — praying over it and welcoming it, with their other kids, into the family. This story tends to be deeply creepy to many secular people but inspiring to many of the more devout.

(Well, in fact, yes, it does. But the loss of a child is so goddamn awful that, hell, whatever gets you through the tragedy is whatever gets you through the tragedy. What most of us object to is not what Santorum and his wife did, but that they have trumpeted their, ah, unique response to their family tragedy as a legitimate demonstration of their piety and done so for entirely political purposes. When this draws an entirely appropriately profane political response — "Dude, that's really weird!" — we get howls of outrage from the professional Right while the Santorums retreat behind their tragedy and their religion again. Put your business in the street, and somebody's going to notice.)

His book, "It Takes a Family," was infused with the conservative wing of Catholic social teaching. It was a broadside against Barry Goldwater-style conservatism in favor of one that emphasized family and social solidarity. While in Congress, he was a leader in nearly every serious piece of antipoverty legislation. On the stump, he cries, "The left has a religion, too. It's just not based on the Bible. It's based on the religion of self."

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(Short answer? Bullshit. There is no "religion of self." Long answer? The "conservative wing of Catholic social teaching" historically has been oppressive on the issues of personal liberties, distrustful of secular democracy, especially the American kind, and always a day late on the subject of social service to the poor. Dorothy Day, were she to come back from the dead and study the career of Rick Santorum, would find her lifelong pacifism sorely tempted by that baseball bat over in the corner.)

He is not a representative of the corporate or financial wing of the party.

(Okay, here's the moment in which the native ladies sell the intrepid explorer bags of coffee beans while assuring him that he is buying the secret magic of the local tribes. Rick Santorum was hip-deep in the effort to reinvent the "corporate or financial wing" of the party by Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay. I don't mean to keep pounding this like a tin drum but, Jesus, you should pardon the expression, if you spend a decade making deals with the biggest bunch of pirates since Jean LaFitte hung 'em up, your subsequent credibility on the topic of the influence of corporate money on American politics should at least be a little tattered. Not to mention that Santorum's plan for raising up the middle class is fundamentally the same as Rick Perry's plan for unleashing American entrepreneurship and Michele Bachmann's for reviving the American Dream — namely, cut corporate taxes to practically nothing, allow rich people to keep as much of their money, foreign and domestic as they can, and deregulate everything everywhere and for all time. This does not distinguish Santorum from any other Republican presidential candidate — with the possible exception of John Anderson — since time began again with Saint Ronnie. Whatever it is, it ain't working class.)

And I do believe that he represents sensibility and a viewpoint that is being suppressed by the political system. Perhaps, in less rigid and ideological form, this working-class experience will someday find a champion. If you took a working-class candidate from the right, like Santorum, and a working-class candidate from the left, like Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, and you found a few islands of common ground, you could win this election by a landslide.

(And, in our final episode, our hero samples some of the local native organic religious compounds and finds himself transcending time and space and drifting off into an alternative reality. Are we even going to pretend that Brooks doesn't want Sherrod Brown crushed into the earth next fall, never to rise again, in order to guarantee a Republican majority in the Senate? Okay, let's pretend that for a moment. What in hell could Rick Santorum and Sherrod Brown agree on that would ever have any substantive chance of passing Congress, being signed by President Anybody, or helping the lives of a single member of the shrinking middle class? Yes, a candidacy like the one described in this particular hallucination certainly would be formidable. And if you strapped a rocket to its back, your shetland pony could win the Kentucky Derby. Where are those "islands of common ground?" I think another expedition may be in order, old sport.)

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